Vic Glover - Keeping Heart on Pine Ridge: Family Ties, Warrior Culture, Commodity Foods

It seems it's easier to write when you're cocky, healthy, and self-assured. Easier when you're secure, fed, and happy. Easier to tell an amusing tale.

The flipside is insecurity, homelessness, and hunger. You still get to live, but not with quite the same quality of life. And it's hard to hammer out a story under a bridge. The story is there, but you've got to carry it around in your head until the opportunity affords itself to put it down onto paper or into a machine.

Like a commentary on civilization, it's hard to teach philosophy to a hungry man. For art to flourish, certain basic preconditions of life must first be met. Hard to produce an oboe concerto on an empty stomach.

Like my Sun Dance brother Mike Afraid of Bear used to shout with joy after finishing a meal, "I'M GONNA LIVE!"

And like these half-breed mutts that hang around here, and the rez dog in general, life on many Indian reservations will teach something about the life of a desperado. Desperado mutts. Feast or famine. Not just the dogs, but many of the people who live here. Loretta once said, "If all these people who want to be Indians knew how hard it was, they wouldn't want any part of it."

I've heard more than once, "It's hard to be an Indian."

That's the price of staying here. You've got to take everything that comes with it, and to understand it, you've got to live it. Sometimes, you have to leave to live. You might wonder, then why would anyone possibly want to live here?

That's what poverty does to people. Like a prison stretch or debilitating injury, it changes your view of who you are, where you're going, and even who you used to be. You live the helplessness, dependency, depression, and hopelessness. One day bleeds into the next. You stop looking in mirrors and attending to anything beyond routine personal hygiene.

"You could use a haircut, Dad," my son Digger told me during a visit, reaching up and playfully flicking the hair growing low, down on the back of my neck. "You're startin' to look like the freaking Yeti."

A look in the mirror for the first time in weeks confirmed his observation. "AIIIIIEEEEEEE."

"Yeah," he laughed, teasing. "You're startin' to look like the freakin' Sasquatch."

So later, after a shave and a haircut with a set of clippers, my daughter Mia cleaned up the back of my neck.

Then here, last week, specifically for cosmetic purposes and concern about a mole under my left eye that appeared to have grown since the last two Sun Dances and prolonged exposure this summer to the sun, I got a surgical scalpel and... some box cutters, by God... and set about removing this dark spot from my face.

Quit twice, thinking that maybe a real doctor should check it out. But no, proceeded straight ahead with what you could call "out patient treatment." Froze it first. No. Washed my hands first. Then, remembering that Keith said he had his frozen off by a dermatologist, I went outside and got some ice, then came in and froze it.

So, if you've got any spots like this that you'd like to remove, that would be my suggestion. Freeze it first.

Next part was a little more complicated, but essentially, all that's involved is the removal of tissue.

At one point, it was sort of painful, and like I said, I quit. More than sort of. It was downright acute. Then I tried again, and quit again, reeling away gasping, "MY GOD," when feeling what I was pulling at was attached to nerves running under my eye, across my cheek under the cheekbone, and down toward the corner of my mouth. It was giving me the yim yams.

The third time... with the scalpel, since the box cutter was too big and awkward for the job, I finally finished the exploratory and excavation part, taking extreme care not to poke myself in the eye, since everything in the mirror was bass ackwards. Trimmed up the remaining skin fragments with toenail clippers.

A down-home, reservation-style, outpatient surgical procedure, not unlike my screaming circumcision, delicately performed at home by my dad when I was about three or foura memory successfully repressed for about forty years until one day when I was in a pharmacy and got a whiff of camphor.

A medicine man once said the pool of saliva under our tongue is a natural antibiotic. That's why when we cut our finger, the first thing we do is put it in our mouth. Dogs got it too, he said. A natural medicine. At the time, there weren't any dogs around to lick it, and I had no camphor, so I used my own spit. It stung, but it felt right.

After a few days the bruise from the traumatized area around the... injury... it wasn't just a mole anymore... began to heal. I checked it out, and, by God, it looked okay. In fact, it turned out so successful that I'm thinking about removing another one, in a more difficult and less public area.

"Yes, Doctor. It could be a difficult procedure," as they say.

Just right now, on the Sunday afternoon show on KILI Radio, "The Voice of The Lakota Nation" (recognized as the best Indian-owned radio station in the country), they're playing some really fine powwow music by Blacklodge, Stoney Park, Northern Cree Singers, and others. Somebody called in complaining, asking about "playing something else," like rap, I suppose.

Anyway, the DJ told them over the air that they could turn the channel if they didn't like it. After the next song, he thanked all the people who called the station in appreciation of the music, and told the audience his show was preserving Lakota culture. And for all those people who love good powwow music, "WE'RE GONNA BE PLAYING IT STRAIGHT THROUGH TILL SIX O'CLOCK," he said with determination and pride.

People called throughout the following song, thanking him. Mostly elders. The DJ later played some honoring songs and expressed condolences to the families of the four rez fatalities that occurred over the weekend.

And since there's sweat lodge tonight, I got up at dawn, thinking about feeding "the boys" tonight and greeting the sun before it disappeared through a crack in a sky covered with thick, gray, ominous clouds.

Thawed some commodity burger, busted open commod tomatoes, tomato sauce, and red kidney beans, and tossed them in a pot with onions, garlic, and chili pepper, along with a green bell pepper I got from Sandy, and mixed up a big pot of commodity chili.

Made some commodity cornbread from scratch... not that that's anything complicated... and a batch of commodity oatmeal and raisin cookies. Got cinnamon and brown sugar from Sandy, too, but the rest was all commods.

I'm happy to have the commodities... they'll get you by, though it's far from "fine dining." Outside, a biting wind is howling, like it has been all day, blowing the fur flat against the ribs of the rez dogs, walking sideways and leaning into the wind that back-drafted intolerable smoke into my tiny cabin, which Poncho says he'll probably need back in a couple of weeks, since he's expecting to be leaving his current residence.

That's what prompted me to use the oven. Not Poncho... the intolerable smoke. Had to empty live coals into a galvanized tub outside and air out the cabin. Needed the oven for heat. Then, while I was over at Sandy's getting the cinnamon and brown sugar and bell pepper, the wind pulled some of those ashes out of the tub and set to smolder some straw and wood chips right there under the porch. My pile of wood ten rows deep, twenty-five feet long, and six feet high was a mere fifteen feet away.

It's a good thing I came home when I did. Otherwise Poncho might have questioned why I burned down his cabin. It would be highly suspect, since he was just here yesterday. If it was me, I'd wonder if I did it just in spite. Such things have been known to occur around here.

Nah. That's not my style. I'm more inclined to take off to somewhere remote and act like I'm never coming back. Sell everything off for the tickets. I've got a thousand-dollar woodpile and a buffalo robe that should easily fetch a round-trip ticket to Hong Kong, which, incidentally, these days you can go British Airways for $265 out of New York. Since that box cutter incident, they're begging people to fly.